The Trudeau complex: How Harper’s attacks on Liberal dynasty could be a double-edged sword

Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a swipe at the Liberal leader after Justin Trudeau, left, said he wouldn't announce his plans for the economy until 2015.

Photograph by: Postmedia News
, Postmedia News

OTTAWA — On Oct. 3, 2000, Justin Trudeau rose from his front-row pew in Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica and slowly climbed the stairs to the altar, delivering an emotional eulogy for his deceased father, former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

After the 28-year-old son bade farewell — “Je t’aime, papa” — and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, he walked to the flag-draped coffin, leaned into it and closed his eyes.

Millions of Canadians shared the moment. The nationally televised coverage of the funeral capped a remarkable week of public sorrow at Pierre Trudeau’s death. In life, he had been a polarizing figure; in death, he was transformed into a political legend.

Thousands of kilometres to the west, in Calgary, another man was determined not to let the “myths” surrounding Trudeau’s legacy take root.

Stephen Harper, then the 41-year-old president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), was a proudconservative who had spent three years as a Reform MP. He had entered politics in the mid-1980s, in part because of his disdain for how Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society” had changed Canada.

So while others were celebrating Trudeau’s legacy, Harper hammered out a newspaper article eviscerating the former prime minister on everything from policy to personality.

On national unity, he wrote that Trudeau was a failure. “Only a bastardized version of his unity vision remains and his other policies have been rejected and repealed by even his own Liberal party.”

Trudeau had merely “embraced the fashionable causes of his time,” wrote Harper.

Getting personal, he took a jab at Trudeau over not joining the military during the Second World War: “He was also a member of the ‘greatest generation,’ the one that defeated the Nazis in war and resolutely stood down the Soviets in the decades that followed. In those battles however, the ones that truly defined his century, Mr. Trudeau took a pass.”

The article was published in the National Post Oct. 5, 2000 — two days after the funeral.

To this day, it provides a rare glimpse into the inner soul of Stephen Harper, starkly revealing his contempt for Pierre Trudeau.

Now, almost 14 years after Trudeau’s death, Harper is preparing to face off in the 2015 election against the first-born son of the man he so despised.

That looming showdown — already foreshadowed in attack ads and derisive comments portraying Justin Trudeau as flaky — raises questions about Harper’s instincts and behaviour. Is his political judgment being coloured by his deep dislike of the Trudeaus? Or is it immaterial to him whom he faces in next year’s contest?

Trudeau recently told Liberals he’s getting ready “for the personal attacks” that will come his way from Harper’s Conservatives. “For some reason, I drive them nutty.”

With 18 months until the election, Harper’s political future could hinge on how he tries to discredit his opponents. His party’s public support has plummeted at least 10 points since the last election and the Tories are now running second, behind the Liberals.

The prime minister must decide how much to deride NDP Official Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair, whose party remains competitively in third place. A healthy NDP that keeps votes out of the Liberal camp could allow the Tories to win some tight three-way races.

The Tories are not overlooking New Democrats: they have sent leaflets known as “ten-per-centers” into some NDP-held ridings with a photo of Mulcair under the headline “Reckless spending, higher taxes.” But it’s not the type of TV ad campaign they have aimed at Trudeau, and letting the NDP off the hook to focus on the Liberals might be a dangerous gambit.

In previous years, through negative TV attack ads, Harper was able to destroy his Liberal opponents before campaigns even began. Stephane Dion was ravaged for perceived bumbling incompetence. Michael Ignatieff was painted as an academic outsider motivated by opportunism.

Trudeau, however, is different. Many Canadians can remember him growing up at 24 Sussex Drive. His supporters call him “Justin,” just as New Democrats called the late Jack Layton by his first name.

So how far can Harper successfully take his attacks? Will they merely play into the hands of Trudeau, who says Canadians are tired of Harper’s “negativity”?

“I think it’s partly personal, that he wants to take on Trudeau,” says Gerry Nicholls, a former vice-president of the NCC who worked closely with Harper there. “I think part of it is he’s concerned that he’s the only one that can beat Trudeau.

“He’s afraid that what he’s created here, what he’s put together, will be overturned by another Trudeau. I think that’s a notion he can’t stomach.”

Indeed, Harper proudly boasts of how he is changing Canada with an agenda of lower taxes, strict law-and-order reforms, and a foreign policy that emphasizes trade.

Others aren’t convinced Harper is fixated on beating Trudeau simply because of his lineage.

“I think he’s moved a long way beyond that,” says former Reform leader Preston Manning. “I think a leader has to be looking forward. If you’re going forward looking in the rear-view mirror, you’re liable to run into a tree.”

Tom Flanagan, who ran two of Harper’s leadership campaigns and one election campaign for the Conservative party, says it’s not about Trudeau per se. He says Harper is “basically a predator.

“All opponents are prey. It doesn’t really much matter who the opponent is. When he has an opponent, he becomes single-minded in attempting to defeat him. It’s not really a personal thing. It’s more a predatory thing.

“He knows the stakes are too high to get caught up in personal animosities that could affect your judgment. I think that’s the way that Harper approaches things. A very cold-blooded kind of calculation,” says Flanagan, who is no longer part of Harper’s inner circle.

Still, the animosity towards Pierre Trudeau runs deep.

In the spring of 1987, a 28-year-old Harper was handpicked by Manning to be his chief policy officer. Later that year, Harper spoke to the Reform party’s founding convention in Winnipeg.

“Twenty years ago, Canada was ushered into a new era with the promise that the establishment of a ‘Just Society’ was imminent,” he said at that time.

“The rhetoric has not changed. Seldom is there political debate in Canada today — even debate on technical issues — that is not saturated with moral terminology about what is fair, just, and compassionate.

“Yet real fairness remains an issue. The more Canadians hear about fairness, especially here in the West, the more elusive and ephemeral fairness seems.”

Harper also railed against Canada’s social policy.

“The welfare state has placed unprecedented power in the centralizing hands of the federal bureaucracy, both in terms of its new reaches into Canadian life and its insistence on standardizing all policies and practices on a national scale,” he said. “What we are talking about here is big government.”

Elected as a Reform MP in 1993, Harper used his first speech in Parliament to condemn the “distant government” that ended Alberta’s boom times through Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program.

“No Canadian can live through an experience like that without it influencing greatly his or her thinking about government and about our country,” said Harper.

Nicholls, who began working with Harper in 1997, says it was clear that Trudeau was “enemy No. 1” for him.

“You have to remember that for a lot of people like Stephen and a lot of conservatives, Pierre Trudeau’s time in Canada was like a revolution. It overturned a lot of the things they loved about Canada.”

“Not just the economic things. But some of the traditional things: the monarchy, the military. It really cut deeply to the psyche of a lot of conservatives.”

As prime minister since 2006, Harper has worked to reversethat legacy and put his own stamp on Canada: an emphasis on smaller government and less interference in provincial affairs, lower taxes, and a repudiation of government-run social programs.

***

When Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership on a Sunday evening last April, he received the customary phone call of congratulations from the NDP’s Mulcair.

But no call came from Harper.

Instead, the next morning Harper’s party launched an attack ad with video footage of Trudeau taking his shirt off at a fundraiser for the Canadian Liver Foundation, with carnival-style music playing in the background.

“Justin Trudeau — he was born with a famous name, but does he have the judgment to be prime minister?” the narrator asked.

The ad, it seems, bombed. The Liberals inched up in popularity and stayed there. Harper’s Tories fell in public popularity.

But Harper wasn’t giving up. At the Conservative party’s convention last October, Harper took aim at the Liberal leader. “Could Justin Trudeau run the economy?” he asked. “In 2015, we’re not choosing the winner of Canadian Idol.”

In recent days, the Tories have aired more TV ads — once again using the shirt-removing clip and stating Trudeau is in “way over his head” on issues such as terrorism, marijuana legalization and deficit reduction.

For his part, Trudeau has begun to invoke his father’s legacy as a call to arms. Last month, he told Liberals that when his father said in 1968 that Canada must be a Just Society, “fairness was at the heart of that argument.”

“He devoted his entire life to that principle. Wrote about it, thought about it, promoted it every chance he got. Heck, some say he even named his first-born child after it.”

Liberals speak of the need for major investments in areas ranging from infrastructure to transportation, although the price tag is unknown.

It’s also unclear how Trudeau’s own vision of a Just Society will take shape — apart from promising it will be built on principles of “fairness, freedom, progress, opportunity, and compassion.”

In his National Post op-ed following Trudeau’s death, Harper wrote of how he had, as a young man in 1977, been unable to attend a lunch he had been invited to with Pierre Trudeau. In 1999, he finally met Trudeau Sr. “simply by chance” on the streets of Montreal.

“There I came face to face with a living legend, someone who had provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion, all in the form of a tired out, little old man,” wrote Harper.

“I do not make this statement to be unkind or cruel. But one must believe a grown-up will see the world differently than an 18-year-old, just as one must hope Canadians will come to view Mr. Trudeau more soberly than when it mattered.”

Now, Harper is facing a different Trudeau — neither tired out, nor old. He’s counting on Canadians to take a sober look at his opponent. The battle lines are drawn.

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